Videos

Fabrication of a Micro-House by µRobotex Station

A 20*10*15 µm micro-house made by bending and assembly of pieces cutted into a thin membrane of thickness 1µm in the µRobotex station of the FEMTO-ST Institute. The joining of the elements and the chimney were obtained by naphthalene deposition. The micro-house is attached to an optical fiber of 120 μm diameter.

Novel Strategy for High Precision Automated Robotic Positioning based on Fabry-Perot Interferometry Principle

The paper proposes a novel strategy for high precision fully automated robotic alignment. This strategy permits high accurate and fast alignment of two optical building structures (optical ﬁber , optical component) with optimal optical function in a known referencing between the robotic manipulator and the optical axis. A 6 Degree-Of- Freedom (DOF) robotic platform is used to relatively align an optical component to an optical ﬁber for experimental validation. The obtained results leads to robotic positioning uncertainty of about 0.0021◦ and alignment time of less than 12 s.

Accurate 3D-Positioning in a SEM through Robot Calibration

These works deal with the developpement of a procedure allowing to perform object rotation while keeping it at the same 3D-position in open loop. Such performance is achieved by a method of robot calibration based on visual servoing and autofocus inside SEM. This kind of properties is required for manipulation and 3D reconstruction inside SEM.

These works highlight preliminary results of a new robotic wrist for minimally invasive surgery. This wrist is a high-dexterity miniature robot, able to provide simultaneously the grasping/cutting (1-DoF) and rotations capabilities with 3-DoF. The grasping function is insured by the folding of the top platform of a parallel structure. The grasping capability of the wrist is part of the mechanical structure itself and can be fully controlled by external actuators.

These works investigate a 3D-printed vision-based micro-force sensor intended to be used inside the chamber of a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). The combination of 3D printed elastic structures with a highly effective vision based measurement method allows to design integrated sensors at the cutting edge of the state of the art. Images of periodical patterns are used to measure the differential displacement between the two parts of the compliant structure. By the knowledge of its stiffness, the force applied on it is measured. The stiffness of the elastic structure has been measured to be 15.3 N.m-1, leading to a force range of 25 μN.

Dexterous Micromanipulation for Integrated Optics

High-accuracy, multi-Degrees-Of-Freedom positioning of a beam splitter thanks to the dexterous manipulation of a 4 Degrees-Of-Freedom microgripper. The beam splitter is part of a Michelson micro-interferometer providing a high accuracy position measurement feedback (active based principle).

Single frequency-based visual servoing for microrobotics applications

This paper proposes a new implementation of direct-phase measurement methods to achieve 3-DoF visual servoing. The proposed algorithm relies on a single frequency tracking rather than a complete 2D discrete Fourier transform that was required in previous works. Several experimental validations (in favorable and unfavorable conditions of use) were performed using a XYθ microrobotic platform. The obtained results demonstrate the efficiency of the frequency-based controller, this in term of accuracy (micrometric error), convergence rate (30 iterations in nominal conditions) and robustness.

Multistable module devoted to digital microrobotics

Compliant monolithic multistable actuator which is able to switch its moving part between several stable positions linearly in one dimensional direction.The number of stable positions can be increased by extending the range of displacement of the moving part.

3D reconstruction from SEM images of a pollen grain

Dense 3D reconstruction is a very powerful characterization tool for microscopic objects. Works are done around this subject combining SEM calibration, micro-robotic plateform characterization and stereovision.